Collecting business intelligence on your documents

by Dan Morris, Sr. Solutions Architect

You put a lot of work into the documents you create, and a lot of thought into the documents you share. In fact, most business decisions in your company rely on people like you sharing information with others who absorb, react to, make decisions about and take action upon the information you share.

So, it stands to reason that knowing what happens to a document after you publish or share it can offer a lot of insight. Yet in this arena, the business world has been a black hole. (Unless of course, you follow up with recipients to find out what they’ve done with the documents you’ve sent them, which they may not recall, if they even respond.)

There’s a lot of information about your documents that you’re simply not getting

For example, knowing that recipients are forwarding your documents to others can tell you that your journal article has pass-along value and may warrant a larger outreach campaign for more lead generation. Or, it could tell you that you need to take better control over that information and revisit security protocols and policies.

Likewise, if recipients make comments, or forward your document to others who then make comments, this kind of intelligence can inform you about critical feedback from others not originally on your distribution list.

Lastly, if you know, for example, which pages of your document are most often skipped, that’s great insight into honing your content. Maybe your white paper doesn’t need to include the section on legacy data archiving techniques. Perhaps your presentation can be cut to 12 slides instead of 20.

The list of examples goes on. Suffice to say, in our connected world, more insight into how your documents are used once they leave your hands means more business intelligence. We call this kind of insight document intelligence, and we provide you with it via ConnectedPDF.

cPDF document intelligence lets you track who copies, prints and shares your document, as well as how much time they spend on pages, which pages they skip, whether they redact lines, and other events that are critical to understanding how your documents are used.

Document intelligence in cPDF tracks two things: the file itself and how users interact with the file. This can be applied to the file as a whole or to individual pages, giving you the most insight into how your content is being used and by whom. Document intelligence enables you to know:

How much time is spent viewing the document or specific page

The number of times a page is viewed

The pages that were most often skipped

Whether an offline copy was printed

Whether the file was sent for a shared review

You’ll have instant access to page-by-page analytics that let you determine which pages readers find most appealing.

This level of document intelligence in cPDF is paired with:

cPDF Security – This enables you to grant and revoke access privileges to your documents, even after you’ve already published or emailed them—and even if someone downloads them and shares them with others, so that you have complete control over your document at any time in its lifecycle.

cPDF Collaboration – This allows you to enhance teamwork through file sharing, comments, and connected reviews, which take care of all connectivity at the document level, so you don’t need to host the document or even email it.

The dawn of the Internet of Documents era

With document intelligence embedded right into the document, you get invaluable business intelligence about—and control over—how your documents are used. In today’s connected world, that’s a leg up over the competition.